Wendigo and its ravenous appetite for human flesh

The Wendigo is a mythical spirit which transforms humans into ravenous flesh consuming beasts when possessed. From Native American Algonquian folklore this creature has been sighted in numerous regions deep in the forests of the Atlantic coast and Great Lakes Region in the United States and Canada. Many campers, hikers, and forest dwellers that have disappeared near these locations over the years have been thought to have been prey to this creature.

The Algonquians had their own tales of the Wendigo, their description of the creature is a giant fifteen-foot spirit with eerie glowing eyes, sharp bloody fangs, razor claws, giant antlers, and matted with hair and desiccated flesh giving off a pungent odor of decay. Some tribes believe that the Wendigo was once human that was transformed into a human by dark magic. A more popular belief is that humans that have been overcome by greed, gluttony, and excess that ultimately resort to cannibalism turn into Wendigos. This is perhaps why translated, Wendigo means “The evil spirit that devours mankind” in other words a ravenous spirit that consumes human flesh.

Wendigo story

During the early nineteen hundreds, there was a Native American Cree Indian by the name of Jack Fiddler. Fiddler claimed to have killed about a dozen Wendigos however he was tried in court for killing another Cree Indian woman. In his defense of the crime, he had said that the woman was in the midst of transforming into a Wendigo and that he had to save the members of the tribe before they fell prey to the creature.

Is Wendigo still out there?

Only one thing is certain and that is that no one really knows what really lurks beyond the backwoods. Many appearances have been made over the past years and a variety of witnesses have come out to tell their tales of how they almost got devoured by the Wendigo. The Native Americans have told their story for hundreds perhaps thousands of years and now this bloody mouth dripping, decayed skin, human flesh starved animosity has come to the modern world. The question should not be ‘Is Wendigo still out there?’ but instead, ‘Is anybody safe?’.